Forgeng, Jeffrey L. Paulus Hector Mair's Ars Athletica. A Compendium of Renaissance German Martial Arts. Volume 2: Dussack

For those interested in the martial arts of medieval Europe, German fencing manuals treatises on martial arts are among the most important surviving sources of documentation: no other region in Europe has produced such a comprehensive body of work on medieval combat techniques. Among these, and even among the treatises on martial arts written by other cultures, the extensive compendiums commissioned by the scholar and swordsman Paulus Hector Mair (1517-1579) stand out as particularly ambitious and monumental. The text survives in three manuscript copies, each consisting of two volumes, with each manuscript comprising approximately 1,200 pages and containing about 17 weapon forms (depending on how they are counted), from the two-handed sword to the rapier, from armoured combat to the sickle and scythe; each form consists of 8 to 136 richly illustrated techniques, in many cases followed by one or more groundbreaking texts on the form. The various weapon forms are linked in technique and vocabulary and together offer an enormous amount of interpretable material. The combination of text and image in the illustrated techniques offers obvious advantages for understanding a physical exercise, and Mair is unique among German masters in that he systematically gives instructions to both combatants, so that when learning a technique, one also learns how to counter it. Finally, one of the most important features of the Ars Athletica is the Latin translation, which serves as a kind of Rosetta Stone for interpreting the vocabulary of these long-lost martial arts. In this series, Dr Jeffrey Forgeng, translator of the equally groundbreaking fencing books by Joachim Meyer and Hans Leckuchner, has assembled a team of translators and practitioners to tackle Mair's work. Over a decade of work went into transcribing, translating and annotating Ars Athletica (Treatise on Martial Arts), which includes both the German and Latin originals as well as a modern English translation. Volume Two of this series deals with the Dusack, a sporting version of the older Langesmesser (long knife), a single-edged utility knife characteristic of the German-speaking areas of Europe. The Dusack, sometimes made of wood, sometimes of leather and occasionally of steel, was the training weapon for all one-handed swords. Mair's 44 Dusack sequences included here represent one of the earliest surviving treatises on this weapon: earlier texts tend to focus on the knife, and readers will note that Mair concludes this section with his own revision and treatment of some of the most famous knife texts of the previous century.